


Demeter Does Earth Day

by odiko_ptino



Series: Modern AU [21]
Category: Greek and Roman Mythology
Genre: Gen, garden tips, permaculture discussion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-16
Updated: 2018-12-16
Packaged: 2019-09-20 13:47:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17023743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/odiko_ptino/pseuds/odiko_ptino
Summary: An earth goddess forcibly permaculturizes Icarus' apartment.





	Demeter Does Earth Day

He’s just - used to it, now. He barely even bats an eye anymore, when he walks home from class and gets accosted by a new (always remarkably attractive) stranger. They’re turning up everywhere now, ubiquitous and mildly annoying, like insects or pollen.

But he hasn’t gotten quite so inured to the presence of Greek gods in his life, that he isn’t startled when he walks into his apartment one day and sees a woman in there: tall and heavy-framed with wheat-colored hair and dark skin, surrounded by plants and a dismaying amount of dirt.

Icarus’ brain actually focuses first on the disastrous mess in his living room, rather than the intrusive presence of the woman, so maybe he is getting too used to the gods. 

“Wha… what the hell?!” he manages to stammer, gaping at the potting soil which is currently everywhere. "What is all this… who are you??“

The woman glances over. "Oh, hello! You must be Icarus!” 

Icarus fights the urge to be annoyed at this statement – ‘you must be Icarus.’ It’s his damn apartment!

He nods a bit jerkily. “Uh – y-yeah. That’s me.”

“I’m Demeter.” The woman straightens up – she’s very tall – and offers a hand that swallows Icarus’ own. Her hand is clean, actually; completely free of dirt, in spite of the fact that she’s been clearly digging around in it for a while now. This bodes well for his security deposit, maybe.

“It’s… it’s a pleasure to meet you, uh… Lady… Demeter…?” Icarus asks hesitantly, uncertain if she needs a fancier title than ‘Lady.’ She’s one of the six original Olympians, isn’t she? Who established the known order of the world? Then again, Helios is older than all of them, isn’t he? But then again, it’s hard to look at the feisty, mouthy sun Titan and think ‘Lord’ or ‘elder god.’ But he is those things… maybe Icarus needs to give this some more thought – but they nearly all immediately tell him to drop the title anyway –

“Just Demeter, hon,” Demeter interrupts his train of thought. She makes a little clucking noise with her tongue. “Helios was right; you’re polite. I guess opposites attract, eh? Ha ha!”

She has a voice that carries with confidence and a certain loud joie de vivre; everything about her conveys the sense of a woman who is taking up all the space she cares to. A woman who isn’t going to be set aside or pushed around. 

“I’m always… surprised to hear how many people have heard of me,” Icarus says.

“Those two dumdums are obsessed! Sunny – that is, Helios – he told me about you first, you know – we’re great friends. Of course, at first, he was just all competitive and bragging about how you were gonna fall for him first – what a little show-off. I’d say I hope he didn’t annoy you too much, but, well, I know Sunny well enough to know he probably did. Probably still is, right? Ha ha!”

“Heh, well, you’re not wrong,” Icarus says, smiling in spite of himself. Demeter has a certain folksy charm, he supposes – pushy but friendly. “They kinda both… bust in here all the time bring a lot of chaos with them… er…” Is this a good segue to address the forcible terraforming taking place on his living room floor?

She grins at him, hands on her hips. “So polite! Yeah, Sunny said you were going to have a fit about my little project – and by ‘fit,’ he said your eye was gonna twitch and you’d probably cry about it later. Well, relax. It’ll all be gone when I’m done.”

Icarus sags with relief. “Oh, thank god – er – gods…? – uh, I mean. I don’t want to seem ungrateful, for, whatever… you’re doing? It’s just, like, I paid a security deposit, and I was worried that – well – irrelevant, now, I guess, right? Because everything’s fine. Um. Well, uh… so… what are you doing, anyway?”

Demeter is wearing that look of barely-suppressed amusement that the gods all wear when Icarus starts babbling, and Icarus is briefly terrified that she’s going to comment on his dorky awkwardness – she seems to lack any social delicacy – but she takes the bait he offers at the end, and turns back to the Lawn & Garden explosion.

“Sunny said you eat about as healthy as he does, which would be horrifying, if it’s true – and I looked through your pantry, Icarus, and it’s pretty grim in there.”

“Apollo says the same thing,” he offers weakly. She tuts at him.

“At least one of them is paying attention! But you really shouldn’t rely on the gods to spoon-feed you, I taught agriculture to humanity for a reason – ”

“I used to volunteer at the community garden, before I started taking classes… it’s just, there’s not much I can do in an apartment…”

She snaps her fingers at him. “Aha! But there’s where you’re wrong! There’s a ton you can do in a small space – I’ve done a lot of tinkering to get it so you can have a practically self-sustaining farm right here in your apartment. You’ll be eating healthy, fresh food – the kind of food you were intended to eat – and Helios tells me that you’re very environmentally conscious, so this’ll be a great opportunity for you to incorporate sustainable gardening into your life and decrease your carbon footprint as well!”

Damn it. She’s tapped into his easily-summoned barely-subconscious guilt he feels about the state of the world. He’s helpless to protest as she walks him through her system of stacked containers and polypipes (is that a real word? Must be Greek; Icarus has no idea what it is) and window planters and how his tiny little 3x3’ balcony is going to be crammed full of vegetables, that balcony is going to be working overtime on accommodating the plants but it’ll be worth it when he can have fresh salad and grains every night, instead of endless ramen noodles and hot dogs!

It’s not that Icarus cares what she does with the balcony – he never goes out there anyway, due to that whole debilitating fear of heights/falling. But he’s starting to get a little bit worried now. Icarus is all for salad but it’s not like fresh produce is that hard to find. There’s an organic corner store two blocks away. The problem is, he couldn’t afford to eat healthy. Like the way he probably can’t afford all the garden paraphernalia involved in keeping these plants alive. And even if he had extra cash to spend – well, he wouldn’t, because he’s more or less constantly working his jobs in order to have cash in the first place, which means he has no time to attend to maintaining what’s beginning to look like a little biosphere, as Demeter arranges her project and talks about heritage tomatoes and how she’s invented a new species of pepper and Icarus can be the first to grow it.

“It’s just…” he begins, nervously. Demeter looks over at him expectantly, the seedlings of Speckled Garfech, Golden Pow and Angels of Saucing going into a converted vertical shoe rack. How do you say ‘no’ to a goddess?

“I’m not sure… how I’m going to be able to take care of all these. I’m nearly always busy, with school or work, and I don’t have a lot of extra money to spend…” He gestures at the edible jungle forming around him. “I would feel terrible if all these plants withered up, because I wasn’t a good enough – farmer, to take care of them. And after all your hard work.”

Demeter smiles at him, indulgently. “Oh, hon. You really are such a worried, responsible, polite little guy. No wonder Sunny’s nuts for you. What a cutie.” She chucks him under the chin and goes back to her tomatoes. “I told you, I’ve done a lot of tinkering! You won’t have to do anything but eat, when it’s time. The only good thing about having Sunny and ‘Pollo hanging around all the time is you know these plants’ll get sufficient light.”

“They need water too, though? And there’s so many… and, like, fertilizer and stuff?”

“Hydroponics!” Icarus’ brain immediately envisions some kind of Star-Trek-like botany room. 

“Hydroponics…? I don’t have any water…”

“You goof. You do too.” Demeter is pointing at Mr. Limpet, the fish Icarus won at the summer jubilee last year. Mr. Limpet is currently eyeing Demeter and Icarus with a certain piscine curiosity from where his 5-gallon tank sits in place of honor by the bookshelf.

“Mr. Limpet is using that, though.”

“Right, and that’s what you want! Though if you want to maximize your growth, you’ll need more fish. But essentially, you just need a bigger tank, and set up a pumping system to run fish-water through all the plants, then back through a filter so it’s all good to go in the tank again!”

“I have no idea how to do that.” He can’t really use the ‘do I look like a rocket scientist to you’ rejoinder, since rocket science is part of his intended career field, so he just goes with plain ‘I’m a dumbass’ speech.

“Neither do I,” Demeter says, unexpectedly. “Well, I do, but I’m not as great at it. Poseidon’s really got a great system figured out, though – you’ve heard of him, right, Lord of the Sea? He does freshwater, too, now. He’s great at it, a very charming, talented rascal. I’ll send him along a bit later.”

“O-oh,” Icarus says, a small voice, lost as Demeter continues talking about all the plans she has for his place.


End file.
